Heightened Sexual Attraction Under Conditions of High Anxiety

SOME EVIDENCE FOR HEIGHTENED SEXUAL

ATTRACTION UNDER CONDITIONS

OF HIGH ANXIETY

Male passersby were contacted either on a fear-arousing suspension bridge

or a non-fear-arousing bridge by an attractive female interviewer who asked

them to fill out questionnaires containing Thematic Apperception Test pictures.

Sexual content of stories written by subjects on the fear-arousing bridge and

tendency of these subjects to attempt postexperimental contact with the interviewer

were both significantly greater. No significant differences between

bridges were obtained on either measure for subjects contacted by a male

interviewer. A third study manipulated anticipated shock to male subjects

and an attractive female confederate independently. Anticipation of own shock

but not anticipation of shock to confederate increased sexual imagery scores

on the Thematic Apperception Test and attraction to the confederate. Some

theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.

There is a substantial body of indirect evidence

suggesting that sexual attractions occur

with increased frequency during states of

strong emotion. For example, heterosexual

love has been observed to be associated both

with hate (James, 1910; Suttie, 193S) and

with pain (Ellis, 1936). A connection between

"aggression" and sexual attraction is

supported by Tinbergen's (1954) observations

of intermixed courting and aggression

behaviors in various animal species, and a

series of experiments conducted by Barclay

have indicated the existence of a similar phenomenon

in human behavior. In one study,

Barclay and Haber (196S) arranged for students

in one class to be angered by having

their professor viciously berate them for having

done poorly on a recent test; another

class served as a control. Subsequently, both

groups were tested for aggressive feelings and

for sexual arousal. A manipulation check was

successful, and the angered group manifested

signfiicantly more sexual arousal than did

controls (p < .01) as measured by explicit

sexual content in stories written in response

1 This research was supported by University of

British Columbia Research Committee Grant 26 9840

to the first author and National Research Council

Postdoctoral Fellowship 1560 to the second author.

2 Requests for reprints should be sent to Donald

G. Dutton, Department of Psychology, University

of British Columbia, Vancouver 8, British Columbia,

Canada,

to Thematic Apperception Test (TAT)-like

stimuli. Similar results were obtained in two

further studies (Barclay, 1969, 1970) in

which fraternity and sorority members were

angered by the experimenter. The 1970 study

employed a female experimenter, which demonstrated

that the aggression-sexual arousal

link was not specific to male aggression; the

1969 study provided additional support for

the hypothesis by using a physiological measure

of sexual arousal (acid phosphatase content

in urine samples).

Barclay has explained his findings in terms

of a special aggression-sexuality link and has

cited as support for his position Freud's

(1938) argument that prehistoric man had to

physically dominate his potential mates and

also a study by Clark (1952) in which increased

sexual arousal produced by viewing

slides of nudes yielded increased aggression

in TAT responses. Aron (1970), on the other

hand, argued that an aggression-sexuality

link exists, but it is only a special case of a

more general relationship between emotional

arousal of all kinds and sexual attraction. To

demonstrate this point, he designed a study in

which instead of anger, residual emotion from

intense role playing was the independent

variable. In this experiment, each of 40 male

subjects role played with the same attractive

female confederate in either a highly

emotional or a minimally emotional situation.

510

SEXUAL ATTRACTION UNDER CONDITIONS OF HIGH ANXIETY 511

Subjects enacting highly emotional roles Included